Could I ask you to reconsider phrasing like "Washington DC is, in fact, a shiny bubble of disconnected elites"? The District of Columbia has one of the highest poverty rates and inequality rates in the country and I fervently believe that conflating the city with political/lobbying "elites" (many of whom live in the suburbs, or even other parts of the country) contributes to a way of thinking that does real harm to the many disadvantaged people living in DC.
Fair point because this tendency also bothered me when I lived in DC. But for the purpose of this dude's song he means "political DC" which is how the shorthand gets used.
Articles like this is why I pay you each month. The working class like this guy only see the guys on the supermarket line in front of him using eBt for sugary food. So the fat cat on park ave he doesn’t know or understand. And you are out there to educate him. We need more union outreach to people like him. Maybe join his Facebook groups and spread the word? What are other ways to get the message out to rural areas and break the Reagan spell of trickle down economics?
They just go back to being the way they were before making the same stupid arguments...
I DO feel for them in that they are victims, but they are complicit in their victimhood...And how much time and energy are we required to use (and likely waste) to bring them over to the light? Their hate and ignorance is WILLFUL...That's the problem...They don't 'lack' information, they DELIBERATELY ignore it...
HOW CAN I HELP YOU IF YOU WON'T FUCKING HELP YOURSELF??
erg!
(Sorry I don't always feel this way, it's just one of those days)
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 16, 2023Liked by Hamilton Nolan
Whooo! Hot damn. Straight on. Corporations create child abuse and neglect, poverty, illness, homelessness, rage with the greed of the Boards and C-Suiters. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the kid who’s left home alone because the mom cannot afford daycare and she cannot afford to lose her crappy paying job where she is hit on by her boss and hears sexist-racist-ageist comments day-in and day out. Where she lives in fear of losing a job she hates because it’s the only way to keep an overpriced leaky roof over her head and a few bites of poisoned Frankenfood in her belly, and the bellies of her terrified children, who yearn to connect with her but know, when she gets home from work and the wearing ways of the world, their mamma is a heartbeat away from tears or tearing things up. Because she is FRIED. Toasted, roasted, friend, and broasted by a system bent to keep her in her place. Where they can use her up the way enslavers did 150 years ago. And have her live in fear while at the same time she is to be grateful that she “gets to keep her job.”
Agreed! We need to be pissed off. Collected, connected, unionized, energized and ready to back each other up on flipping the script here.
Bernie Sanders has it right. Elizabeth Warren is ON IT. We missed it in 2016 by letting Bernie get screwed. Get Biden back in and save democracy but in the meantime let’s get it together and rally around folks such as David Hogg, who’s trying to help the Dems fire up young people to elect scientists. And rally around Bernie and Elizabeth. I’m doing my best by trying to show the world how trauma is making the perpetuation of these insane SYSTEMs created to keep Rich people rich and to suck money from poor people keep hurting people, and that there is a better way.
Easy steps?
Register to vote.
See how to support unions.
Support democrats - especially women Dems and unions.
Read Heather Cox Richardson, Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich and this guy.
Talk to young people and help them register to vote.
Promise to take older people to the polls.
Volunteer for Dems in your area.
Democracy is at stake. Unions are democracy at work.
respectfully, the vast majority of "democrats" are doing the same job as the gop of misdirecting working class rage away from the wealthy people at the top, as hamilton pointed out in the above article. bernie is a rare exception. DNC leadership as it is will NEVER willingly put their money behind a candidate like him or warren
Yep. I get it. And we lost that 2016 moment to flip it. And I was part of it. I wanted Warren snd then Clinton and we all should have been backing the greatest contrast to Trump because oddly, there were people torn between Trump and Sanders because all they cared about was getting rid of the Black guy and making big change from “middle ground.”
"Just as the ruling class sees all that rage as something to be stifled and redirected and dissipated, the left has to know that that rage is our raw material. That is our fuel."
This is so right. It makes me sick. I thought you were going to say more about how the “elites” are channeling rage toward minorities, not just government. I feel that racism is a huge reason for resentment of social safety net benefits.
As I read this, I kept thinking about James McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here", a country-esque song which seems to accurately identify the villains of our story. I don't think that it was ever a hit. I can't even remember how I found it several years back.
Subscribed today, and LOVED this piece. The only thing I believe you didn’t directly address is what I (and I’m sure many people) see as a “Lost Cause” subtext.
It’s not good salt of the earth people like me -- it’s those northern bureaucrats giving food stamps to undeserving people, and the undeserving people are wasting it (buying food). Maybe I missed it in your excellent piece, but I thought the song’s overlay of capitalism and white supremacy was important enough to mention. Really terrific essay. Thank you!!
Excellent. I screenshot and circled several parts of this today! What makes all this difficult too is that the wealthy are so good at making it seem like everyone has the same access to money as they do, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and plenty of people fall for it. When things don’t turn out to be that easy, the sausage-making of the rich remains hidden, and the only ones to argue with are the people in front of us.
Good piece and we need a lot more like this. The Reagan "revolution" succeeded in driving a wedge between working people and the really poor. It is a tough mindset to overcome; that people on food stamps and receiving any form of public assistance are simply lazy and have their hands in the pockets of hard-working folks. We need more organizing campaigns directed to this demographic -- working class white people living in small towns and rural areas. The Dem Party makes very little effort to win over this constituency. They flock to Trump because he says the system is rigged against them. He's right.
In Bernie's campaigns he also talked about the system being rigged against working people - but he placed the blame where it belongs, as Hamilton has presented in this piece. Nothing is easy, but if the Dem Party would spend more $ on organizers who understand and like spending time with working people rather than TV spots and other propaganda telling us what a danger Trump is we would have a lot more progress.
respectfully, the vast majority of "democrats" are doing the same job as the gop of misdirecting working class rage away from the wealthy people at the top, as hamilton pointed out in the above article. bernie is a rare exception. DNC leadership as it is will NEVER willingly put their money behind a candidate like him or warren
I don't disagree with this comment. Some entity/organization/party/movement should be putting priority into organizing working-class small town rural people. And some of that is always going on. But a meaningful campaign to win over a chunk of the working-class constituency that has embraced Trumpism is going to take money. And the Dem Party has money.
Very good analysis of the ongoing “misdirection” (quoting Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism quoting magicians as to how they fool their audience) used by ruling class and its agents.
And very good on the idea of winning over these folks through conversation/explanation/common ground. Sounds a lot like organizing.
Would like to see someone explain to Oliver the rich man IN Richmond, his Governor, who used to be the CEO of private equity monster, the Carlyle Group, and how he should probably be more angry at guys like that....
Aug 16, 2023·edited Aug 16, 2023Liked by Hamilton Nolan
Incisive post.
From my post below, The Despicable Rich, an additional take on why the very wealthy are tolerated.
"I suppose I’m musing about whether in a subtle, almost subliminal way attitudes toward inequality are softened by the preponderance of stories where the rich self-sabotage themselves into unhappy or even tragic circumstances. Could the schadenfreude produced by these stories be the modern equivalent of bread and circuses?"
Loo at this whole comment section, and look at the comments in under the youtube at the brain dead robot comments. All those people- Appalachians. Then look at the entire Movie-and TV word and it's the same people. The Republican party, is most Appalachians, then because Appalachian like to fight each other, they are the loudest and dumbest BIDEN fan boys in the world.
Appalachians move outward into all the rural areas and became the loudest voice in every single state, because just enough of them agree on what they like, they became the "normal."
Appalachians are weird. And they hate government completely. If all Appalachians were kicked back to Ireland, Scotland, and norther England, we would have healthcare, banned guns, and cities that aren't covered in cars and parking lots. And if you think all those things are bad, you're just another boring Appalachian who likes making people suffer, and your failure means a better world.
Holy rat balls! You obviously do not like the Constitution or agree with the principles of our Founding Fathers. You very cleary have serious issues from something that happened in your life. I pity you...and will pray for you my brother. I hope you get the help you need.
Could I ask you to reconsider phrasing like "Washington DC is, in fact, a shiny bubble of disconnected elites"? The District of Columbia has one of the highest poverty rates and inequality rates in the country and I fervently believe that conflating the city with political/lobbying "elites" (many of whom live in the suburbs, or even other parts of the country) contributes to a way of thinking that does real harm to the many disadvantaged people living in DC.
Fair point because this tendency also bothered me when I lived in DC. But for the purpose of this dude's song he means "political DC" which is how the shorthand gets used.
While rich men inside Richmond work to stop workers from organizing. Maybe you heard they're erasing "CRT" from public school curriculum, did you know they're also erasing labor history? https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/teamsters-to-youngkin-hands-off-history-301776457.html
Good call.
Yes! Real people are born and live in DC their entire lives and will be here long after the politicians other people send leave.
To paraphrase your own piece, this clarified and put into words a thought or feeling that I’ve already had
TAX RICH PEOPLE!
Here is the right answer, but you want say it because you
(AND YOU HAVE THOUGHT THIS BEFORE!)
YOU WANT TO SUCK OFF THE RICH!
Articles like this is why I pay you each month. The working class like this guy only see the guys on the supermarket line in front of him using eBt for sugary food. So the fat cat on park ave he doesn’t know or understand. And you are out there to educate him. We need more union outreach to people like him. Maybe join his Facebook groups and spread the word? What are other ways to get the message out to rural areas and break the Reagan spell of trickle down economics?
Just talking to people is a good start.
They just go back to being the way they were before making the same stupid arguments...
I DO feel for them in that they are victims, but they are complicit in their victimhood...And how much time and energy are we required to use (and likely waste) to bring them over to the light? Their hate and ignorance is WILLFUL...That's the problem...They don't 'lack' information, they DELIBERATELY ignore it...
HOW CAN I HELP YOU IF YOU WON'T FUCKING HELP YOURSELF??
erg!
(Sorry I don't always feel this way, it's just one of those days)
I've often dreamt of some sort of billboard campaign. Coded right wing, QR codes leading to some simple messaging.
Whooo! Hot damn. Straight on. Corporations create child abuse and neglect, poverty, illness, homelessness, rage with the greed of the Boards and C-Suiters. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the kid who’s left home alone because the mom cannot afford daycare and she cannot afford to lose her crappy paying job where she is hit on by her boss and hears sexist-racist-ageist comments day-in and day out. Where she lives in fear of losing a job she hates because it’s the only way to keep an overpriced leaky roof over her head and a few bites of poisoned Frankenfood in her belly, and the bellies of her terrified children, who yearn to connect with her but know, when she gets home from work and the wearing ways of the world, their mamma is a heartbeat away from tears or tearing things up. Because she is FRIED. Toasted, roasted, friend, and broasted by a system bent to keep her in her place. Where they can use her up the way enslavers did 150 years ago. And have her live in fear while at the same time she is to be grateful that she “gets to keep her job.”
Agreed! We need to be pissed off. Collected, connected, unionized, energized and ready to back each other up on flipping the script here.
Bernie Sanders has it right. Elizabeth Warren is ON IT. We missed it in 2016 by letting Bernie get screwed. Get Biden back in and save democracy but in the meantime let’s get it together and rally around folks such as David Hogg, who’s trying to help the Dems fire up young people to elect scientists. And rally around Bernie and Elizabeth. I’m doing my best by trying to show the world how trauma is making the perpetuation of these insane SYSTEMs created to keep Rich people rich and to suck money from poor people keep hurting people, and that there is a better way.
Easy steps?
Register to vote.
See how to support unions.
Support democrats - especially women Dems and unions.
Read Heather Cox Richardson, Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich and this guy.
Talk to young people and help them register to vote.
Promise to take older people to the polls.
Volunteer for Dems in your area.
Democracy is at stake. Unions are democracy at work.
Peace.
respectfully, the vast majority of "democrats" are doing the same job as the gop of misdirecting working class rage away from the wealthy people at the top, as hamilton pointed out in the above article. bernie is a rare exception. DNC leadership as it is will NEVER willingly put their money behind a candidate like him or warren
Yep. I get it. And we lost that 2016 moment to flip it. And I was part of it. I wanted Warren snd then Clinton and we all should have been backing the greatest contrast to Trump because oddly, there were people torn between Trump and Sanders because all they cared about was getting rid of the Black guy and making big change from “middle ground.”
G’night.
I like this group!
"Just as the ruling class sees all that rage as something to be stifled and redirected and dissipated, the left has to know that that rage is our raw material. That is our fuel."
Hell yeah.
This is so right. It makes me sick. I thought you were going to say more about how the “elites” are channeling rage toward minorities, not just government. I feel that racism is a huge reason for resentment of social safety net benefits.
As I read this, I kept thinking about James McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here", a country-esque song which seems to accurately identify the villains of our story. I don't think that it was ever a hit. I can't even remember how I found it several years back.
I'm a big fan of Will Hoge. He sounds so damn country, but everything he sings about has a hard left lean. It's so refreshing in that genre.
Subscribed today, and LOVED this piece. The only thing I believe you didn’t directly address is what I (and I’m sure many people) see as a “Lost Cause” subtext.
It’s not good salt of the earth people like me -- it’s those northern bureaucrats giving food stamps to undeserving people, and the undeserving people are wasting it (buying food). Maybe I missed it in your excellent piece, but I thought the song’s overlay of capitalism and white supremacy was important enough to mention. Really terrific essay. Thank you!!
Excellent. I screenshot and circled several parts of this today! What makes all this difficult too is that the wealthy are so good at making it seem like everyone has the same access to money as they do, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and plenty of people fall for it. When things don’t turn out to be that easy, the sausage-making of the rich remains hidden, and the only ones to argue with are the people in front of us.
Good piece and we need a lot more like this. The Reagan "revolution" succeeded in driving a wedge between working people and the really poor. It is a tough mindset to overcome; that people on food stamps and receiving any form of public assistance are simply lazy and have their hands in the pockets of hard-working folks. We need more organizing campaigns directed to this demographic -- working class white people living in small towns and rural areas. The Dem Party makes very little effort to win over this constituency. They flock to Trump because he says the system is rigged against them. He's right.
In Bernie's campaigns he also talked about the system being rigged against working people - but he placed the blame where it belongs, as Hamilton has presented in this piece. Nothing is easy, but if the Dem Party would spend more $ on organizers who understand and like spending time with working people rather than TV spots and other propaganda telling us what a danger Trump is we would have a lot more progress.
respectfully, the vast majority of "democrats" are doing the same job as the gop of misdirecting working class rage away from the wealthy people at the top, as hamilton pointed out in the above article. bernie is a rare exception. DNC leadership as it is will NEVER willingly put their money behind a candidate like him or warren
I don't disagree with this comment. Some entity/organization/party/movement should be putting priority into organizing working-class small town rural people. And some of that is always going on. But a meaningful campaign to win over a chunk of the working-class constituency that has embraced Trumpism is going to take money. And the Dem Party has money.
Very good analysis of the ongoing “misdirection” (quoting Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism quoting magicians as to how they fool their audience) used by ruling class and its agents.
And very good on the idea of winning over these folks through conversation/explanation/common ground. Sounds a lot like organizing.
Would like to see someone explain to Oliver the rich man IN Richmond, his Governor, who used to be the CEO of private equity monster, the Carlyle Group, and how he should probably be more angry at guys like that....
Incisive post.
From my post below, The Despicable Rich, an additional take on why the very wealthy are tolerated.
"I suppose I’m musing about whether in a subtle, almost subliminal way attitudes toward inequality are softened by the preponderance of stories where the rich self-sabotage themselves into unhappy or even tragic circumstances. Could the schadenfreude produced by these stories be the modern equivalent of bread and circuses?"
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/the-despicable-rich
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about
Right on! Clear, lucid, honest and clears the fog of oppression and deceit.
How we all need to respond to every shiny new "culture war" skirmish.
Great piece, but when Oliver hits it big, he'll hate those taxes even MORE! (Same for many hit-it-big fantasizers in his audience.)
He hates rich people and Taxes!
Lets get rid of all Taxes!
That will show all the rich people!
It will give them more money and power to raise the rent on your house until you can't afford anything and die in a gutter, you worthless Appalachian!
Why do you hate Appalachia?
Loo at this whole comment section, and look at the comments in under the youtube at the brain dead robot comments. All those people- Appalachians. Then look at the entire Movie-and TV word and it's the same people. The Republican party, is most Appalachians, then because Appalachian like to fight each other, they are the loudest and dumbest BIDEN fan boys in the world.
Appalachians move outward into all the rural areas and became the loudest voice in every single state, because just enough of them agree on what they like, they became the "normal."
Appalachians are weird. And they hate government completely. If all Appalachians were kicked back to Ireland, Scotland, and norther England, we would have healthcare, banned guns, and cities that aren't covered in cars and parking lots. And if you think all those things are bad, you're just another boring Appalachian who likes making people suffer, and your failure means a better world.
Holy rat balls! You obviously do not like the Constitution or agree with the principles of our Founding Fathers. You very cleary have serious issues from something that happened in your life. I pity you...and will pray for you my brother. I hope you get the help you need.
You worthless Appalachian! Always trying to change the conversation.
Did I say anything about the Constitution or the Founding fathers. NO I DID NOT!
And if I did, explain how instead of trying to fake your way into looking like a human being instead of the worthless Bug you are!
Don't waste Your god's time praying for anything, God already knows everything you say is FAKE!